Day 243: The Fourth Wing First Impressions

So ... I don't want to rag on this book too hard, obviously a lot of people like it, but man. So far it's been a struggle from page one. There's a couple things driving me nuts. What immediately sticks out is a complete lack of focus. The author is trying to put as much into my head at once as possible and the end result is a really jumpy perspective. It's like watching a movie where every cut is a jump cut and every shot has shaky cam. For two, the exposition dump at the start is a big hurdle. That's pretty much standard for fantasy novels, but all this information could have been delivered over the course of a few chapters instead of a few pages. It would have been really cool to hear all about dragons, the war college, the war itself, magic, and the rocky family history in due time. Instead I get tiny drops of each all swirled together haphazardly. This stuff is like ammunition against the reader's boredom, fired into the corpse of a dead horse. I'm sated with one, but all at once feels like a waste. If I didn't have to take all of it in right at the very start (along with the main character's current woes), then Yarros would have been able to hold my attention for much longer.

"Mom braces her hands on the immaculate surface of her desk and leans in slightly as she stands, looking us over with narrowed, appraising eyes that mirror the dragons’ carved into the furniture’s massive legs. I don’t need the prohibited power of mind reading to know exactly what she sees."

This is a few seconds into the first chapter, and almost every sentence has been like these two. Where am I supposed to be looking here? At her imposing mother? At her narrowed, appraising eyes? At the dragons in the furniture? Or should I be thinking about the prohibited power of mind reading?? These details detract from the relationship between mother and daughter, which seems like the primary focus of the scene, but it gets lost in the weeds. So far pretty much every scene has been lost in the weeds. I'm struggling to figure out what point any given paragraph is making.

Again, I don't want to rag too hard, because the events happening are pretty cool. Dragons and war college and fighting and stuff. I'd just like to see more clarity in the writing itself. Hopefully she'll hit her stride and things will come more naturally as the story progresses beyond the first few chapters.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley